


(self) imposed limits

by anthropologicalhands



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: 4.16 date interlude, Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection, Kissing, this is both shippy and not, trapped in a car with someone you want to be trapped in a car with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 09:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19885045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/pseuds/anthropologicalhands
Summary: There are advantages and disadvantages to small enclosed spaces. A 4x16 date interlude.





	(self) imposed limits

“You know, we could have just stayed outside after the concert ended,” says Nathaniel, as they try to fit together in the backseat of his small, fancy car without becoming too hopelessly entangled. “Better view. Way more room to spread out.”

“Yeah, but it was getting chilly up there,” Rebecca points out, intentionally coquettish, sliding down Nathaniel’s body so that her chin is resting on his chest. “Don’t you agree that this is cozy?”

“I’ll agree that it’s _cramped_ ,” says Nathaniel, gesturing to where one of his legs is still half-slung in the front seat, because there is a limit to how tightly he can fold himself up while she is splayed over his lap. Still, his petulance seems more for show than anything else, if the way he keeps his arm slung over her waist and holding her close is any indication. Rebecca smiles and shifts upwards until they are eye-to-eye, their noses nearly touching.

“Intimate,” she corrects, with a quick peck on the lips that he returns unthinkingly. She feels warm and safely in the moment, with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her palms and his arms around her and their legs entwined as they are.

“Anyways, I only remembered once you were back on the freeway and turning around would have been a lot of trouble.” Rebecca adds, which is mostly true.

He doesn’t need to know the other part, how she realized that they weren’t just returning to her house because the concert was over, but that with every mile the end of the date loomed, which meant that she would have to start thinking about the date that came before and start preparing for the one that would come after, and then she would have to _compare_ them. A familiar beat started to drum through her head at the thought – not one of her own invention or a leftover echo from the Marty Macaroon concert, but the onset of panic.

Rebecca isn’t ready to think of those things yet. Not when she wants this date to be a _just a_ _date_ , something they only did for such a brief interlude between subterfuges. She’s already been in a funk once this evening – something in her sours to feel it again before the date has even ended.

Hence suggesting that they pull over by the park to mess around in the backseat like teenagers.

Rebecca tries to slide down so she can dip her head into the crook of Nathaniel’s neck, nudging his collar aside to seek his pulse with her mouth, but then he shifts beneath her and his hands come up to brace her shoulders, not rejecting her but not letting her melt into him the way she wants to. She looks down at him inquiringly and he gives her a tight, regretful smile.

“Listen,” says Nathaniel, his face set the way it was the last time she tried to be intimate with him, when she was angry and spiraling and just wanted someone she thought would never turn her down until he did for both their sakes. “Not that I want to complain, like, at all, but for the record, the rules of this whole date thing _really_ don’t include—"

He stops abruptly when Rebecca presses a finger to his lips; he raises his eyebrows at her disbelievingly, like really, she’s gonna do that here?

“Believe me, _I know,_ ” says Rebecca, with an exaggerated eyeroll that has Nathaniel laughing quietly beneath her. He’s not as quiet as he ought to be, though, so that she is obligated to dip down and kiss him again, to shush him.

The old, wannabe-bad part of Rebecca points out that the actual rules, as spoken by Whijo, were just that Nathaniel couldn’t take his own shirt off—there was nothing said about her taking his shirt off _for_ him, let alone pants or dresses. But she knows (and she knows that Nathaniel feels the same way) that talking themselves into a loophole is an impulse best left unheeded, that it continues a pattern that neither of them want.

(Even if they do _want_.)

“I know,” Rebecca repeats, trying to sit up straight and nearly bumping her head against the car’s roof. She smooths her hands over his chest in a way meant to be comforting, sliding them up to cup his jaw, enjoying the feeling of the contour of his face beneath her fingers again. “Don’t worry, this is definitely a clothes-stay-on makeout sesh. We stay firmly at second base, or we will if second base is the one that doesn’t include hand stuff, because I like the metaphor but still don’t know anything about baseball. Do I have that right?”

“Definitely,” says Nathaniel, managing to look serious despite the fact that his neck and lips are already smudged with her lipstick. Rebecca bites back a giggle.

“Good. Now what’s with the face? Are you not in the mood?”

He shakes his head. “Not that. I just feel like I should have expected this.”

“Consider it the second unexpected twist of the night, then.”

“ _Hey,_ ” he says lightly, aware that she’s teasing, and Rebecca’s laugh turns into a shudder as his hands shift; no longer just holding her but tracing a curving line down her back, the fabric of her dress catching as he does.

“Don’t worry, I’m kidding. Well not really, but you know me – I love a good twist. And you, actually, twisted it _very_ well. Way better than I expected, and I had a really nice time, also twisting, together with you.”

She means it; as fun as a night of Broadway hits would have been, with the lost possibility of needling Nathaniel into singing along with her now that she knew he _could_ , Rebecca appreciates this version of their night – the dancing, and the laughing, and the utter lack of polish on the whole thing; it feels apt, that while they took turns at being uncertain and worried at the beginning, they were able to end up with something real and sweet and beautiful.

“Good,” says Nathaniel, trying for cool but his relief is too evident. “And, again, in the spirit of this thing, it isn’t cheating that I didn’t take you home right away, right?”

Rebecca rolls her eyes. “It’s not like we ever set a time limit, and I have never obeyed Naomi Bunch’s curfew even when I had one. If Whijo tries to claim it’s a violation, I’ll argue the legalities of it.”

“Hm, very sexy of you.”

“Right? Definitely not cheating.”

“Yeah, I’d like to avoid that.”

He doesn’t mean it as a barb, but Rebecca’s grin falters, and her hands absently toy with the corner of Nathaniel’s collar. “Yeah. Hey, listen, I’m sorry about earlier, that whole accusing you of using your money thing.”

Nathaniel looks uncomfortable, even as he shrugs and makes a dismissive flick of the wrist. “I mean, I get it. In the past, I have not been above underhanded tactics – it’s not exactly an out of left field accusation.”

“Yeah, but still,” says Rebecca, letting her hands slide up and around his neck, thumb absently brushing at the short hairs there, feeling him shudder slightly beneath her. “I already know how you’ve changed, and it would have been a dumb thing to do, but I was still all keyed up about the weirdness of this whole situation and it just…” She shakes her head. “Anyways, it was uncalled for.”

It’s the elephant in the room – or car, though she hoped the lack of space might keep it away a while longer. It hit her as she passed through the kitchen earlier in the day, on her way to meet Nathaniel and seeing Josh sitting alone at their table. His smile had triggered a different realization: that their comfy friendship might not return to normal if she rejects him, and the guilt of that moment nagged at her through the drive to the observatory, made her hyperaware of the weirdness of the entire scenario, of seeing one boy after another after another in preparation for a choice that she didn’t really understand. Made her feel ill and hypersensitive to technicalities, because elimination based on a technicality might be different from a rejection, might not be all on her.

She wishes all of that lurching unease would just _go away_ – this is _their_ date, not the second in a series or whatever, and she wants to keep something of it just between them, without the weight of a future decision and the imaginary press of the eyes of an audience awaiting her choice with bated breath.

“Again, I get it,” says Nathaniel, his hand coming up to absently secure a lock of loose hair behind her ear, and the familiarity of the gesture makes her want to sink over him and into him.

“But still. I mean it. And it’s good that you didn’t, not just because you’re a good person and all that, but that’s never been our _thing,_ right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love fancy dress dancing and trips as much as the next girl, but we’ve never needed that to have fun together. Like, if you just locked us in a box with a piece of string, we could probably make it a good date.”

Nathaniel lets loose a huff of laughter. “I mean, I hope I could plan something beyond a date in a box.”

She giggles. “Well, we’ve already had that date. Minus the string.”

Nathaniel frowns up at her and she tamps down on the urge to smooth the creases in his forehead away.

“You can’t be seriously talking about the elevator, are you?”

Rebecca shrugs. “I mean, technically we spent the night together, talked about our favorite books, and ended it with a pretty hot kiss. It could count.”

If one left out the engagement, the inappropriateness of their behavior, and all the rest of it, she doesn’t say.

“…you do remember that George _trapped_ us in there, right?” says Nathaniel, eyebrows still arched high on his forehead, like he knows that she is teasing but is not quite confident enough to know for sure.

“Oh, I know, but what I mean is that we are good at making our own fun, even without sex. And let me tell you, that doesn’t mean nothing. I’ve been on some pretty freaky-ass dates.”

“I believe you,” says Nathaniel with a perfect sincerity that makes Rebecca both want to kiss him again and pull on his hair a bit for being a brat.

“Oh, shut up.” She bends down to nip at his lower lip before levering back up on her elbows. He laughs into her mouth and draws back a little again, much to her frustration.

“Not yet.” He brings up his hand to cup the back of her head, pulling her hair off her shoulders and keeping it from hanging like a curtain between them. “One last check-in.”

“What?”

He wets his lips. “You did have a good time tonight, right?”

She smiles down at him, full of tenderness at his uncertainty. “I’m still having a good time. Cramped quarters and all.”

“Well, speaking as the person who will definitely have cramped quarters tomorrow, that’s all on you,” he says at last, his hands sliding back down to her waist, and she laughs as she curls back over him.

Nathaniel’s right – it is not the most comfortable way they could be doing this, but it’s a discomfort she likes, because they keep shifting and adjusting, never letting go of the other person—there is no way that they can move and not touch each other. And the car may be small but once they know its limits, it’s easy enough to get creative, working with what they have.

She wishes the limits set for the dates had done the same. It was what they were supposed to do – whittle them down to the barest components and help her decide which of them suited each other best. But the parameters aren’t real, because they don’t really isolate the important part, that undefinable _thing_ that she’s looking for. Or how she shifts with them, because she shares something different with each guy. It’s not exactly falling back into old patterns, because there is a firm, core Rebecca-self where there used to be a mirror. But it means that she can adapt, that she can see herself happy with any of them, and in the farthest corner of her mind, she doubts that anything will shake this conviction.

The thought terrifies her, but she doesn’t let herself slide into a panic of ‘what-ifs’. She knows what the problem is, and she’ll talk with Dr Akopian in the morning. Right now, she’s with Nathaniel, two people trying to inhabit the same space in the same moment, and she wants to stay there, in the present and in the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> This piece frustrated me a little. I wanted R/N to mess around in a car while still dealing with Rebecca's ambiguous feelings about the date, but this didn't quite gel the way I hoped. But hey, they are cute and fun and I miss them.


End file.
